Of course, Jody Abzug knows all the answers. With regard to this set of pictures, she notes:

Even though I promised myself I would let others respond I couldn’t miss the opportunity to prove you mostly wrong (just like old times!). I can identify all but one person on that yearbook page. Of course the mystery person is in the first photo on top but then, its Bob McLean, Tim Farnham, Karen Olson, Nick Beatty, Dirck H., & Carter Zinn.

In the next line of pics its Karen Olson (solo); Carter Zinn (solo) and Russell Werkman & Tim Farnham.

The web, of course, is a powerful tool. Sometimes its power makes for less privacy than one might hope for. This link gives some highlights about the readership of this blog. As noted, I am not sure that this is as accurate as one might like. In particular, I can’t imagine who the 150 unique visitors we get per week might be. But, I have a good guess about at least one of our visitors today.

I sent an e-mail today to President Schapiro with info on the blog and my question about his signing of letters to parents, hence, in all likelihood, his visit. I am one of those alums who occasionally send in letters to the administration with their oh-so-insightful comments and suggestions, so this is not the first time that President Schapiro has heard from me. I was also a (forgettable) student of his in ECON 401 15 years ago (as were a dozen or so of our classmates). In any event, I’ll provide any updates that come in.

But, big picture, you have to like a guy that uses Netscape 4. That is Old School!

Although I have yet to convince him to start co-blogging with me, my father (class of 1958) was kind enough to provide some background on President Baxter. He writes:

James P. Baxter was universally known as Phinney. In our Freshman-Sophomore year a jazz band was formed which took the name Phinney’s Favorite Five. In the Fall of ’55, I even lined up a gig for the Band for a Football Weekend Party at a RPI fraternity house. Playing a strong tuba with the band was my roommate (and future best man), Thomas B. Jones, Jr (known as TB).

In mid ’56 TB went on to the Marine Corps and Phinney’s Favorite Five went on without him for four decades until in the 90’s it became the Reunion Jazz Band, which band is still today driven by Fred Clifford and Bob Kingsbury who are originally and still “boys”, as you say, from the Class of ’58.

Besides playing a mean tuba, TB also played varsity squash at Williams. I remember seeing his picture as one of the many team pictures that used to line the walls of the old gym. I hope that they have kept up that tradition. Walking by those old photographs each day for practice provided me with a great sense of the history that I was becoming a part of. Years later, those emotions were perfectly captured by Robin Williams in “The Dead Poet’s Society” when he takes his class to view the old pictures that lined the walls of their fictional New England prep school. From the script,

Keating turns towards the trophy cases, filled with trophies, footballs, and team pictures.

KEATING: “Now I would like you to step forward over here and peruse some of the faces from the past. You’ve walked past them many times. I don’t think you’ve really looked at them.”

The students slowly gather round the cases and Keating moves behind them.

KEATING: “They’re not that different from you, are they? Same haircuts. Full of hormones, just like you. Invincible, just like you feel. The world is their oyster. They believe they’re destined for great things, just like many of you. Their eyes are full of hope, just like you. Did they wait until it was too late to make from their lives even one iota of what they were capable? Because you see gentlmen, these boys are now fertilizing daffodils. But if you listen real close, you can hear them whisper their legacy to you. Go on, lean in.”

The boys lean in and Keating hovers over Cameron’s shoulder.

KEATING (whispering in a gruff voice): “Carpe.”

Cameron looks over his shoulder with an aggravated expression on his face.

Decades from now there will be another young man at Williams who will walk down those halls on his way to practice. Perhaps he will play squash like TB Jones and I did (although I hope that he plays more like TB than like me). Perhaps he will go on to the Marine Corps. Whatever his future might hold, I hope that he sees our pictures and wonders about us, about where we went from Williams and how prepared we were for the journey. I hope that he realizes how fortunate he is.

Not sure why I am so fascinated by events at Williams 50 years ago, but I can resist posting a letter from the late James P. Baxter.

Comments:

1) Again, I love the way that the letter refers to your “boy” at Williams.

2) I recall that the President Baxter was referred to using the name Phinneas, which I guess might have been his middle name. By all accounts that I have read, he had an incredibly important influence on Williams. I think that there was a great article about him in the Alumni Review a few years ago (at the time of his death), but I could be confused.

3) The original letter that I have seems to be signed by President Baxter. Did he sign every letter? Does President Schapiro? ;-)

4) Note how the letter is somewhat customized, explicitly noting that my grandparents had indicated that they would be visiting for Parents Week-end.

5) I love the fact that there were JA’s 50 years ago and that there are JA’s now. If they run the JA selection process now the way it was run 15 years ago, then the notices for this year about who was accepted and who was not are about to be sent out.

Before I finish up the 1954 brochure, I thought that I would post a regular, albeit class of 1988 filled, page from the yearbook.

Although Scott Berman claimed that the woman of Jake House were easy — at least I think that is what he wrote — I think that most everyone will be hard-pressed to identify all of our classmates in these pictures. Please, prove me wrong.

I am getting more proficient with the scanner. So, if anyone has pictures, papers or anything from our time at Williams that can be scanned, please consider sending it to me. I promise to take good care of it and either mail it back to you or bring it to the reunion. Please, open up that old box of Williams stuff, rummage through it and, when you find something that brings back a smile, please consider sharing it with the rest of us.

I was getting somewhat tired of the page by page march through the yearbook, so I thought that I might try something new.

How about that?

I am a bit of the family historian, so all of the saved correspondance between my father and his parents has come down to me. He was class of 1958 and lived in Williams C his freshmen year, as did I and my brother, class of 1990. Above is, obviously, the mailing that was sent to the parents about Freshmen Parents Weekend 49 years ago. I have some more material along these lines that I will be posting in due course.

One of my daydreams is to turn this blog into something that would continue beyond our reunion. I, for one, would certainly be interested in a little piece of Williams on the web, something that would allow alums to both reminisces about their time at Williams and keep up on current events on campus. If anyone else would be interested in such an exercise, please let me know.

Jake house was bought by Tim Frechette’s (’89) brother, David (’93), aka Turk, a few years ago now. He and his wife, Mika, also ’93, got it for a song and gutted the place — looks beautiful now. Rumor had it that the house was going to be torn down before the Frechette’s stepped into the picture. Scott is correct about the women of Jake- maybe one of them can speak to another rumor that the house is actually haunted.

Of course this leaves unsolved the issue of the origin of the Jake House name. I heard a rumor on this, from the women who lived there with my girl-friend/wife, but it is hardly fit for a family blog.

So far, it looks like a small intimate affair…9 alums — with attendance of 17 adults and 17 kids (the Andersons and Depippo’s with 4 kids apiece sure pull up the average !).

In terms of traffic to the blog, this page provides a bit of an overview. On one hand, I am glad to see that we have a core group of users. On a typical day, 27 unique IP’s go to the blog. Admittedly, 6 of these are Kim, Tracy and me (each, presumably, with machines at home and at work). That tracking site also suggests that we have had almost 1,000 unique since starting and around 150 unique visitors per week. I am not sure that I believe this figures, but there they are.

Thanks, as always, for the feedback on the blog. An anonymous reader suggested that I try to find a synomnym for “alas.” Suggestions are welcome.

Google turned up a bio for Gail Covington. She’s with Goldman Sachs in San Francisco and is married with 2 children. She looks busy!

Google was no help at all in finding info on Heather Cook. I know she got married and is a pediatrician somewhere but that’s the best I can do. Just for Dave, I remember……. care packages of amazing baked goods from “Mother Cook”. As the notes she included in the package said, “Nothin’ says lovin’ like somethin’ from the oven.” (Alas, only about 3 other people will remember that.)

Apologies for the lack of google references and scintilatting commentary. I hope to get back into the swing of things soon enough.

As always, we would welcome contributions from our readers. Just go to google, type in a name and poke around. Trust me: It is much more fun than work.

On a side note, apologies to anyone that I sent out an e-mail virus to. One of the problems with having a public e-mail address is that it makes one more often a target of this sort of stuff. I am working on upgrading my systems so that at least I won’t pass any more of these on.

I can’t recall if anyone has provided info on Nils Christoffersen yet, but a Google search quickly served up some info and a picture of him. It’s really quite fun to see how many different paths we’ve taken from Williams!

Just a quick note that Ellen Cogen, if the Web and Alumni Directory are both up to date, is a lawyer in Michigan. Her firm specializes in intellectual property, which sounds like a good fit for a Williams grad!

Wendell Chestnut was inducted into the Chestnut Hill Academy’s Athletic Hall of Fame. The citation reads:

WENDELL K. CHESTNUT ’84

Wendell earned eleven letters playing squash, tennis, and soccer at CHA. He was All-Inter-Ac in Squash and Captain of the Squash and Tennis teams. Nationally ranked as a Junior squash player, he was recognized as the best all-around athlete in his class and awarded the Patterson Cup. He received numerous awards while at CHA, including the prestigious Gold and Silver Medals from the Alumni Association. At Williams College he continued to be nationally recognized as a squash player and was featured in Sports Illustrated. He was named All-American in Squash and was the first African-American to receive that honor.

I believe that, like our classmates named Williams, Wendell’s last name and the name of his school are unrelated, but I have been wrong before. I think that Wendell spent some time teaching and coaching after Williams (but that could be a mis-remembering of Mike Harrington’s comments). He seems to now be Director of Planning and Operations at Fleet Securities. Fortunately, the corporate world seems not to be prevent Wendell from doing some sailing as well as squash and skiing.

Although the citation doesn’t mention it, Wendell was also captain of the squash team at Williams. I played on that team as well (refugee from aborted career in professional soccer) and will always remember Wendell’s grace and patience in helping out those of us (which was all of us) less skilled than he.

George Tolley appears to have placed 113th at the National Crossword Puzzle Tournament held earlier this month in Connecticut. My “sources” tell me Mark Solan was also supposed to be there but I don’t see his name in the rankings. I hope George will write and tell us more about the tournament.

Karen Olson, my former jitterbugging partner, sent the following update:

Thanks for the reference, I made it to the blog and ended up taking in a lot of names that I hadn’t seen for a long time. I think you all have better long-term memories than I do, as I have honed my short-term memory to the detriment of the long-term one. I am a simultaneous interpreter: I work from Russian, French and Italian into English for the international organizations here in Geneva and for anyone else who will pay me on the private market here and abroad. Most of my Geneva clients are in the UN family, and my other most frequent employer is the OSCE in Vienna, where I get to delve into arms control issues and pretend along with the Russian and American delegations that the Cold War never ended. I also teach translation in the Italian-English combination at the University of Geneva. I am afraid I haven’t jitterbugged for ages, but now and again I do what the French call “le rock et roll,” which is much faster than what we were used to. I think that Mark Solan and a friend may have given us a preview of that style of dancing at a freshman year Baxter Hall dance (it’s all coming back to me now!), where the amazing Mr. Zinn was playing trombone or some other such instrument in a Big Band.

Comments:

1) Karen also mentioned that she would be bringing along her fiance to the reunion. Alas, no pictures were provided. How many times do I need to say it? We need pictures. Finance(e)s, babies, pets, whatever.

2) As best I know, Karen is currently the furthest-from-Billsville traveller that we expect to attend.

3) I also learned several years after Williams that, basically, we were teaching the wrong sort of jitterbugging. So it goes. I think that Mark Solan was just too much the gentleman to point this out at the time.

4) I think that there is even a yearbook picture of Mark doing this dance . . . stay tuned for further updates.

If these are not that interesting, someone should please tell me. For me, they bring back many memories . . .

The mystery man here is, of course, Chris Jones, doing his best Jim Morrison impression. Alas, Google is a useless tool for tracking information about him. The last that I heard (via a birth announcement that I no longer have for scanning purposes) is that he an Cecilia Malm were recently blessed with the birth of Emma. But it would be nice of someone could provide a better update.

I am somewhat suspicious of the provinence of the picture. The radiator does not look like something from Chris’s room (next to mine) senior year in Carter House. That was, also the location of the WUFO Captain’s Water Bed, a traditional piece of furniture that must (surely!) have been lost somewhere down the ages. I leave it to Chris and Cecilia to explain this reference to young Emma, should it ever come to her attention . . .

I can answer the question of the 4 people in the picture of student government officers. From left to right, Tracy Blankenship (89 I think), Nicole Melcher, Carter Zinn, Mark Raisbeck. I have no idea how to make that appear on the page where answers to questions appear.

Comments:

1) I believe that Lisa is correct in her indentifications.

2) Alas, we do not have the technology to allow our readers to post messages directly to the blog. The only option currently is to e-mail your comments to me, Tracy or Kim. If there are any Wiki gurus out there who would be willing to help us out with the technology, we would love to provide more a more interactive site.

3) Perhaps Lisa, or someone else, will be able to provide the ID’s for the women in the picture below. It appears to me that they are on the steps of Jake House (extra credit to anyone who can explain why Jake House (last house on the right of Hoxsey (sp?) Street) got its names.

4) I still owe Katy Brackenridge thanks for a phone transfer at Jake House 15 years ago. My then-girl-friend-now-wife (I use this phrase so often in the context of these reminisces that I need a handy shorthand . . . TGFNW?) was moving into Jake House with her 8 (?) friends while Katy (who I don’t remember as Catherine, but perhaps my spelling is wrong) and her 6 roomates was moving out. As senior boyfriends on deck, I was charged with phone issues. Katy kindly allowed us to avoid a re-activation fee and keep using her number.

Although I do my best to keep politics out of this blog, I can’t help but make one comment on current events:

Semper Fidelis to the Marines in combat this evening.

Of course, best wishes go out to all our men and women in uniform around the world. Only a handful of them are Williams graduates, and only one that I know of from our class — which is a loss for both Williams and for the military. But, although my loyalties to Williams are great, my loyalties to the Marine Corps are greater still.

Back to David’s first scanned yearbook page, a few Ephnet directory/Google search results:

Jennifer (Ause) McCord appears to be a 2nd year medical resident at Riverside Family Practice Center in Virginia. Add another one to the doctors list!

I also found Rick Barton, who appears to be a an Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In addition to being a professer of medieval history, it appears that Rick and his wife are the very proud parents of a little girl, Katie. And, add one to the PhD list as well!

Does anyone else out there think this looks like Ben Voorhies (3rd pic on the linked page)? I am pretty sure it is. I can’t find out much about him or the company (Graffiti Graphics) other than the link just provided, but maybe someone else out there will have some scoop.

Incidentally, I tried Googling a lot of the people on the latest yearbook page scan (at least those that haven’t already been touched on here on the blog), and it didn’t find anything conclusive with a first pass. Please write in with any info, news, gossip (!) on these and other classmates! It is getting harder and harder to find good info out there!